174 DESTINY DISRUPTED
own feudal lieges had called Timur into Anatolia. They resented having
lost sovereignty to the Ottomans, and so they sent a message to Timur,
complaining that Bayazid was spending so much time in Europe, he was
turning into a Christian. Well, Timur-i-lang would have none of that, for
along with being a ruthless savage of unparalleled cruelty, Timur was also
a Muslim who fancied himself a patron of the high arts, a scholar in his
own right, and a devout defender of Islam.
In 1402, near the city of Ankara, these two civilized patrons of the arts
set niceties aside and went at each other blade to axe, and may the worst
man win. Timur-i-lang proved himself the more brutal of the two. He
crushed the Ottoman army, took Emperor Bayazid himself prisoner,
clapped him in a cage like some zoo animal, and hauled him back to his
jewel-encrusted lair in Central Asia, the city of Samarqand. Despair and
humiliation so overwhelmed Bayazid that he committed suicide. Out
west, Bayazid's sons began to war with each other over the truncated re-
mains of his one-time empire.
It looked like the end of the Ottomans. It looked like they would end
up having been just another of the many meteoric Turkish kingdoms that
flashed and fizzled. But in fact, this kingdom was different. From Othman
to Bayazid, the Ottomans had not just conquered; they had woven a new
social order {which I will describe a few pages further on). For now, suffice
to say that in the aftermath ofTimur's depredations, they had deep social
resources to draw upon. Timur died within decades, his empire tattered
quickly down to a small {but culturally brilliant) kingdom in western
Afghanistan. The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, not only recovered, it
began to rise.
In 1452 it jumped to a higher level, a stage that began when a new em-
peror named Sultan Mehmet took the throne. Mehmet inherited an em-
pire in good shape, but he brought one problem to the throne. He was
only twenty-one and tougher, older men circled him hungrily, each one
thinking that an older, tougher, hungrier man {like himself) might make a
better sultan. Mehmet knew he had to do something spectacular to back
down potential rivals and cement his grip on power.
So he decided to conquer Constantinople.
Constantinople no longer represented a really important military prize.
The Ottomans had already skirted it, pushing into eastern Europe. Con-